Player Revolt

[Vurt]

Had to chime in -

Shackled City - Smoking Eye Template - it's actually really good. Really good.

I believe I was playing a power attacking fighter-type at the time. The +1 insight bonus to hit in lieu of the regular BAB increase provided by an actual level just didn't sit all that well with me.

 

[Mythmere1]

Well, the players in my group are always revolting...

A few months ago I tried to get them to try C&C and they revolted on me. They played but proceeded to trash the adventure by attacking innocent npc's and burning down a house. That night ended with not one but two TPK's. I learned not to try to run anything but d20 for them and they learned that I will ruthlessly kill them if they piss me off.

My players went along with C&C, but grumbled all the way through until it was no fun. Since I refused to DM 3e any more (the reason we tried C&C), we settled on AD&D 1e and that worked.

I've been involved in a number of player revolts against a railroaded campaign (seeking any way to get out of the adventure's inexorable tide). My wife's character was the best player revolt I ever saw, though (thank god not from my DMing). Her character went and hanged himself in a barn.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Once, this summer vacation. A brother of a friend of mine - he DMs his own group... and started to DM Red Hand of Doom for us. Until that time, he was a player in my campaigns - and he did well (though he leans a bit to the "tragic hero", mixed with "anime kewlness" - but I can tolerate that).

In that campaign... he started to import his Final Fantasy-antics into the game. In a bad way. Since he was using a module... he hasn't really bothered to read more than 3-4 pages ahead in the plot. And tried to railroad us. And was completely surprised, when we did something not expected. And then a previous character of his made a cameo (from my last campaign) - with a potion of fly, swooping down and killing several goblins in one turn.

Then he tried to send us (in a campaign where time is crucial) into the wilderness... to let us "level up" - he thought we should get a bit stronger. And for certain places we wanted to go: "There's nothing about that house in the adventure - you cannot go there."

And RP... died, when he started to announce parts of the discussion, i.e. "So, now comes the first part: First you'll talk about this an that". If we deviated from this: "Eh... that's not discussed in the adventure here - that's for the next part."

And he has only the player-depth of rules knowledge and adventure - this means, he's always looking up stuff, either in the RHoD-book or the rulebooks.

We weren't really happy.

Short-term result: We started to power game, and started to show his monsters a world of pain with Action Surge (extra standard action) and metamagic sticks of doom, combined with save-or-suck, the full-power of an artificer and a sneak attacking Rog/Bar, polymorphed into a hydra - ah, added with improved invisibility.
Long-term result: I'm DMing again... and since that experience helped me through my DM-burn out, everybody is happy again - he gets to play his heroes-with-troubled-past. And to be honest: He is simply the "player type". I'm just a bit sad, that I didn't had the chance to run RHoD myself, because - despite his DMing - the module still feels like a winner.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Once, this summer vacation. A brother of a friend of mine - he DMs his own group... and started to DM Red Hand of Doom for us. .......

I'm just a bit sad, that I didn't had the chance to run RHoD myself, because - despite his DMing - the module still feels like a winner.

I am running that myself for my players right now. The adventure is actually written in such a way that it should not be dependent on a rail road. Most of the important things are done on a time line. If the players screw around, the events just continue to happen. If the players fail to kill certain NPC's, they just show up later to torment the players.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[dpetroc]

I've had a few attempts to forment rebellion from new players who thought they knew more about the (homebrew) campaign world than me. One kept insisting on 'getting back to the quest'. He was complaining that he didn't like 'sidequests' even though my regular players knew that the campaign was integrated to a point where sidequests impacted the main campaign thread. He was invited to not return after about six games of this.

 

[Piratecat]

Way back when I was running 1e (so in '89 or so) I saw a Dungeon Module that looked really fun - a monk/wizard who specialized in puppets, who had stolen a libram to create a powerful golem of negative energy. The dungeon was really challenging, and I loved the idea. I immediately shunted the PCs off their current quest with an NPC who stressed the urgency and asked them to retrieve the book for them. Maybe he blackmailed them, I forget. I missed the looks between the players, but they went along with it.

They got their butts kicked by the adventure; the bad guy used hit and run tactics, and the PCs started to take damage as they slogged through the dungeon. I probably gloated 'in character' as the bad guys as well. I thought the player muttering was in character, too.

Finally they had the bad guy trapped in the last room, but it's tactically hard to enter. The adventure was almost over, but one of the players said, "You know what? My hero is leaving."

I blinked. "Leaving? The dungeon?"

"Yup. I'm leaving. He can keep his book, because I don't especially care about it."
"I don't either." "Neither do I." "We're all leaving." The whole gaming group chimed in.

I was floored. They virtually had the guy beaten! "But... why?" I asked.

"We don't care about this module. We were having fun before, with your adventure. You sort of railroaded us into this. Can we just go back to what we were doing last session?"

It was an important lesson for me. They just left the (very relieved) bad guy there, and doing this never came back to bite them. I dunno, maybe he had a change of heart or something and repented -- but I had missed their mutterings, and they had a good point. I think that's about the time I started to annually poll the players to see how my game could improve.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

1) What triggered the Revolt
2) What form did the Revolt take
3) What was the fallout

I've had a couple of these recently.

HERO 5e
1) The GM decided to "take the game evil" (by going into an alternate universe where the previously good characters were evil), allegedly because "the players wanted it" - when, in fact, all of one player wanted it, and the others all wanted to play good guys with a minor flaw.
2) I discussed it with the GM out of game and decided to write my character out and walk; the campaign broke up when the others played out the next session and, lo, only one wanted to go evil in that manner. :\
3) The campaign died, the GM started another (this time Exalted) and many of the same players were in it.

D&D 3.5
1) My character had been paralyzed; the asked me if I wanted to control a boss (I did), let me play out an encounter (in which I had to restrain myself from TPKing the rest of the PCs), misunderstood the situation and had me make a silly move; the next session, he 'corrected' that silly move by using a balor (the PCs, mind, were all ECL 3 or 4).
2) I told the GM I would either walk or exploit an infinite loop next level (bizarrely, I actually had an in-character justification for the latter ) if the use of a balor in this way stood, because it completely deprotagonized the PCs just to, in effect, retcon to the result the GM wanted but screwed up in the previous session. I would have simply walked, but this GM was a first-timer and I wanted to give him a shot. The rest of the players agreed.
3) The GM retconned back to the encounter where I ran the boss, and we'll proceed from there.

 

[Umbran]

One major occurrence that I can recall...

We were playing White Wolf's "Mage: the Ascension". In short - the DM had a railroad situation in mind - there were only two ways out, and one way was negated by events the PCs could not, even in theory, had known would close off an avenue. In essence, the PCs had to become mass murderers in order to continue on with life.

We players could not accept this. We though, and thought hard. We found seven scenarios that, by the stated rules of the game and the situation we felt should have worked to free us. The GM refused them all. When asked why, he had to resort to, "Because it doesn't work that way."

We eventually gave up. Told the GM, "We are sorry, we have tried our best. We cannot find a way out that the characters will take. If you are dead-set against any other solution, we must accept that these characters are trapped for the rest of their lives. Is making up new characters and continuing an option?"

The GMs response: "Are you guys serious?"

Us: "Yes, those characters would not take the actions you require. To a man, they would rather die. We like you as a GM, this is the one time we have ever had this sort of muck-up, and we would like to continue playing with you, in this game world, but with new characters."

GM: "Well, okay, if you really feel that way, I guess I have to give in - we will use a hybrid of some of the methods you came up with..."

And the campaign went on. The GM recognized later that the "one way out" scenario, which he had never used before, was not as fun as he thought it would be.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Bit of a tangent from another thread, but now I am wondering.

How often have you (either as a DM or a Player) been party to a Player Revolt?

By Player Revolt, I mean anything that the DM did in game that he thought a good idea that the players simply refused to accept. This can be anything from a particular plot twist, the use of a DMPC, or an attempt to nerf a spell / item / feat / class.

What I want to know:

1) What triggered the Revolt
2) What form did the Revolt take
3) What was the fallout

Once, in a Shadowrun 1E game.

1) Our GM wanted us to invade a high-security arcology outside of Seattle...a pyramid with a 3x3 km base and 3 km height...completely self-sufficient, constantly guarded by all kinds of nastiness mundane and magical, only accessible through the tip with freigh helicopters that were subject to heavy security, or one "secret" underground maintenance tunnel, to find one perosn among 150,000 of whom we didn't know where she'd usually be, only had a face and the fact she was magically active.

2) Looking at our characters (still close to street-level punks), we told him outright that our characters would never take such a suicide contract, and left the Johnson in the bar.

3) As we were just out of teenagerhood, we were still prone to arguing and that was what happened...our DM got pissed that we simply ignored his "big run", and we had a little fight over it that vanished in smoke a day later. Typical RPG stuff back then.

 

[billd91]

I once participated in a revolt. The DM had planned an adventure with us taking on a tower of orcs. Looking at the party of mostly dwarves and one human, we decided to go to another wilderness area and prospect for mineral wealth. We ended up doing that for 3 years and got fabulously wealthy.